Modern town planning had emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as a response to the squalor, disease and human misery of slums created by the industrial revolution. Its initial impetus came from social reformers, who saw the solution to social ills in the transformation of the urban environment. Governments also supported reform, fearing that slums provided breeding grounds for revolution.
While sanitation, healthy housing and traffic circulation were major concerns in urban reform, beauty and grandeur were also seen as stimulating a positive social life. People would be proud of their cities and become useful members of society. Many thinkers advanced utopian visions of an ideal city creating ideal citizens.
Two influential town planning movements emerged in the decades before Australia sought a design for its new federal capital. The City Beautiful movement came from the United States, and the Garden City movement from Britain. Each aimed to create healthier and happier citizens by transforming the urban environment.
Public awareness of the health dangers of overcrowded and insanitary slums led from the mid-nineteenth century onwards to building and drainage regulations to produce a healthier urban environment. Large areas of cities were rebuilt to provide adequate sunlight and fresh air. New towns and cities incorporated the latest in sewerage technology in a bid to halt epidemic diseases such as cholera, typhoid and smallpox.
Urban reformers also advocated lower-density building for a healthier lifestyle. In the late nineteenth century a number of model communities were established to provide healthy accommodation for workers. Provision of yard space and allotments meant that residents could grow their own food, thus promoting better nutrition.
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James Silk Buckingham published National Evils and Practical Remedies in 1849. He proposed that a company be set up to build a Model Town, called Victoria. Its plan would unite 'the greatest degree of order, symmetry, space and healthfulness, in the largest supply of air and light, and in the most perfect system of drainage, with the comfort and convenience of all classes'.
In 1876 Benjamin Ward Richardson outlined in Hygeia, a City of Health a blueprint of a model city emphasising health arrangements. Buckingham and Richardson both stressed the importance of fresh air, light and water, and located industry away from town centres.
The Arts and Crafts movement, founded by William Morris, attacked the soullessness of industrial society, and promoted good design. It influenced urban design through its emphasis on social fulfilment, preserving of the built heritage of the past, and the pleasure created by good craftsmanship. Arts and Crafts ideas influenced British followers of the City Beautiful movement.
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Belief that a good environment would produce good workers influenced a number of industrialists in Britain and the United States. They built model towns to house their workers. In Britain, Titus Salt founded Saltaire near York in 1853. He was followed by soap manufacturer W H Lever at Port Sunlight in 1887, and George Cadbury at Bournville in 1895. In the United States, railroad carriage manufacturer George Pullman created a model town associated with his manufacturing works at Pullman near Chicago in 1884.
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Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.
The Garden City movement is associated with British inventor Ebenezer Howard, whose goal was to remedy the overcrowding that created urban slums. Howard, who was born in Britain but had lived in America, was influenced by American social thinkers Edward Bellamy and Henry George, particularly their ideas about ideal communities and land as the basis for value. His book, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, published in 1902, outlined the form a Garden City should take.
Howard drew on the plan of Adelaide, among other places, to develop his theory of green belts dividing the functional areas of a city. The separation of pedestrian and vehicle traffic, and residential and industrial areas, was fundamental. Individual city units should have a population of 30 000. Each of these city units could eventually become part of a wider cluster of towns. An important element of the Garden City movement was its emphasis on leasehold rather than freehold land. Land would be held by a company and profits ploughed back into municipal improvements.
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The city of Adelaide ... is surrounded by its "Park Lands". The city is built up. How does it grow? It grows by leaping over the "Park Lands" and establishing North Adelaide. And this is the principle which it is intended to follow, but improve upon, in Garden City.
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In 1903 Ebenezer Howard's vision is realised with the establishment of Letchworth Garden City, designed by architects Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker.
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"Letchworth was, and remains, a faithful fulfilment of Howard's essential ideas."
Camillo Sitte, a Viennese architect and art historian, believed that charm and beauty had been lost in the drive to clear slums and plan cities on rational lines. Motivated by the Vienna city extension and Ringstrasse development, he published City Planning According to Artistic Principles in 1898. This described how the artistic charm of medieval, Renaissance and Baroque cities had been achieved.
The strict geometrical ordering of much modern planning, said Sitte, denied artistic expression. He advocated asymmetry in some situations. This would permit the creation of more effective vistas and sites for monuments. Sitte founded a magazine, Der StŠdtebau, which became influential in city planning.
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The City Beautiful movement originated with Daniel Burnham's design for the 1893 World Exposition site in Chicago, the 'White City'. Burnham was trained in the tradition of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. He and his Chicago associates brought Baroque design principles to the Exposition site. Its formal planning and classically-inspired architecture created an effect of grandeur which expressed confidence and optimism in the urban culture of the United States. The style was adopted across the country and overseas, and was intended to create civic pride in all citizens.
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Architects and town planners who wished to work in the City Beautiful style could consult books such as Thomas A. Mawson's Civic Art: Studies in Town Planning, Parks, Boulevards and Open Spaces, published in London in 1911. Mawson wrote that 'the city is the place where we are entitled to expect and demand consummate grandeur'. His book describes how this can be achieved.
A boulevard ... is a spacious roadway or promenade made impressive by a profusion of foliage, or foliage and grass, in combination with noble architecture, which together secure grandeur.
The design function of a boulevard is to create vistas, which are terminated by monuments, architectural features, obelisks and fountains. Boulevards play an integral part in the appearance of grand cities.
Baron Haussmann's creation of boulevards formed the Paris we know today. His purpose was as much social reform as beautification of the city. City Beautiful theorist Charles Mulford Robinson argued that cutting boulevards through urban slums had a cleansing effect, awakening them "to larger interests and higher purpose". Cities can also be encircled by boulevards, as is the case with Vienna's Ringstrasse.
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Too much emphasis cannot be laid upon the importance and value of the focal point.
Focal points are a major feature of City Beautiful design. They provide a focus for a vista created by a boulevard, or form central points from which axes radiate. Focal points can be defined by buildings, sculpture, fountains, columns and obelisks.
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A monument ought to express that which is poetic, romantic, dramatic or decorative.
Monuments add to the visual experience of a city in several ways. They form focal points, express the aspirations of the society, or remind citizens of worthy predecessors. A well-designed monument gives beauty and grandeur to a city.
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On the score of grandeur ... the fountain cannot be omitted from our municipal and governmental squares ... places which are on occasion the gathering ground for the people of a nation or a city, are particularly suited to the display of civic art at its finest ...
The great cities of Europe are renowned for their blending of architecture, sculpture and plants in extensive formal gardens planned along geometrical lines.
Gardens and open space were an important factor in the design of cities for health and recreation as well as their ability to create beautiful effects.
Gardens and open space in the heart of the city were also emphasised by United States landscape designers. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed New York's Central Park, described as the 'lungs' of the city.
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On this system a grid is laid over the site without regard for contours, often resulting in very steep streets. Many colonial cities, particularly in America and Australia, were laid out by this method, favoured by surveyors for its convenience. William Penn's plan for Philadelphia is a United States example.
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Radial plans, where diagonal roads extend from central features, were first developed in Europe. Baron Haussmann's nineteenth-century re-ordering of Paris is the best-known example. Wide encircling boulevards or ring roads, such as Vienna's Ringstrasse, were also part of a radial plan. Radial plans allow freer circulation of traffic, and provide attractive vistas and focal points which contribute to the aesthetic appeal of the city. They are the common design element linking the City Beautiful and the Garden City movements, both of which used radiating boulevards combined with circular avenues.
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Designers influenced by the baroque tradition often plan a grand open space at an important point in a city. Boulevards and avenues radiate from this space, usually called a place, piazza, place, platz, or plaza. It may also have a symbolic function, and contain monuments, fountains and other sculptural and architectural elements. Bernini's great piazza in front of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, with its colonnades symbolising the encircling arms of the Church, is an example of a grand place.
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